


the lone wolf dies but the pack survives

by youheldyourbreath



Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Battle of Winterfell, F/M, Game of Thrones AU, no one is safe from the dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 00:39:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19414861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youheldyourbreath/pseuds/youheldyourbreath
Summary: “Do you know what I wished for all those long nights on the road when we were children?”She shakes her head.“I asked the Gods to keep you safe. Spare her, I prayed. Take me instead, if you want a name for your list.”“Peter—”“I need you to live, MJ,” he rasps. “Find a place and hide.”





	the lone wolf dies but the pack survives

“I’m never going to see you again, am I?” she asks, choking on a half-formed sob.

His eyebrows knit in agony and he runs his calloused thumb along the curve of her cheek. In this, what might be his final hours, he will not lie to her. He cannot protect her from the truth. The bravest thing he can do, now, is look it dead in the eye and welcome it like a brother. “No,” he shakes his head, “You won’t.”

Where he goes, what he goes to fight, will likely be the end of him. It will be the end of all men and he is merely a foot soldier in the great battle that awaits him in the morning. “Stay with me,” she heaves, unhappily. She looks ethereal and miserable, drenched in the moonlight, like one of those sad paintings that hang in the halls of the great houses. He has never known a great house, nor a bed beyond the thin cot that was warmed by the fire in the back of the tavern he worked as a child in the South, ages before he met her on the King’s Road.

Then, she had been a wiry thing with a frown for a mouth. When the other lads they were traveling with dared to call her one of those foul names set aside for the girls that worked at night, she threw rocks at their heads. Peter had been utterly enchanted. He supposed, looking back, all the boys had been, too.

Michelle had been the only little girl in their party. She traveled along the King’s Road to see her Aunt. Her mother had arranged travel for her with the old farmer that was taking the boys North to work in Wintertown. They had been only children.

They were not children now.

She leans her face into his hand and he crowds closer to her. Michelle is taller than he, but not by enough that he cannot look her squarely in the eyes. “Listen to me,” he says desperately, “No matter what you hear, come morning, you hide. The crypts should hold. But if they don’t, you need to find somewhere safe. Don’t be a hero.”

She fists her hands in the leather of his jerkin, “Isn’t that what you’re doing? Being a hero?”

His mouth turns up in a sad smile. He cups her face in earnest and rests his forehead against her own. She does not resist the intimacy. Instead, she grabs his shoulders and keeps him near to her. Peter whispers, as his eyes flutter shut, “Do you know what I wished for all those long nights on the road when we were children?”

She shakes her head.

“I asked the Gods to keep you safe. Spare her, I prayed. Take me instead, if you want a name for your list.”

“Peter—”

“I need you to live, MJ,” he rasps. “Find a place and hide.”

“I wish we had more time,” she admits. “It isn’t fair.”

Fair, he mulls over the world. Perhaps she is right and the cards they have been dealt in this life is not fair, but, all the same, he is thankful. They had been separated for years, after she had been kidnapped on the King’s Road, and he had gone to bed every night thinking her dead. Even if the world ends, now, he found her, again. He goes to his death in peace knowing he had minutes, hours, days with her.

When he had stumbled into Winterfell to aid the war against the dead, he had seen her in the courtyard, like an apparition. He convinced himself she was some ghost come to haunt him at the end of the world. The Michelle he knew was a young girl of fourteen, the Michelle that stood in the courtyard that day was a woman grown.

He believed she was mist and smoke until she charged through the crowds and flung herself into his arms. He clasped his arms around her, on impulse, and froze. She felt real and firm and womanly. Years had warped through her like water. She was older and so, she was alive. He could have cried from relief.

He thanks the Gods for their mercy in returning her to him. He wants more time, but he is grateful for that which he has already been granted.

Finally, he says, “I’m afraid to die, but I will do it willingly should it mean you survive the battle.”

Before she can argue, the horns blare. He hears the people strewn all about the courtyard start to mobilize, running and shouting orders. Peter freezes in abject terror. _No_ , it is too soon. It is too early. The people of Winterfell are still sheltered under the protection of night. The army of the dead was meant to be here by morning.

The horns sound.

Michelle throws her arms around him and they sway from the force of their embrace. “Peter,” she says.

“I need to go.”

“Peter, please.”

“Get inside. Stay safe.”

“Peter,” she repeats.

He cups her face between both of his hands and finds the courage to say the words he should have said the moment he saw her, again, when they found each other at the end of the world. He regrets his cowardice now. He gambled away their time by playing it safe. “MJ, I lo—”

She bruises a hard kiss, their first, on his mouth and swallows anything stupid he was about to say. He is too stunned to be thankful. She bends her head and demands a harder kiss. He complies, at once, tilting her head back with the energized hands on her cheeks. She rumbles a noise that, if the world were not ending, would have spurned him to action. As it stands, he cannot do anything but whimper and pull away.

“Don’t be a hero,” he breathes, and steals away, leaving her standing in the bustling courtyard alone.

* * *

The Dothraki fall in flickering lights.

The dead run at the walls, garbling screeches and tearing men apart like parchment.

The Unsullied protect the retreat.

Peter makes it behind the walls just before the doors close.

Ned gets locked outside.

He swings his sword, the crude dragon glass blade, through the next three undead with a wailing, agonized scream for Ned. He does not know if he is dead, but he can hear the men beyond the castle walls shout for mercy and plead for help until they grow silent. Like the Dothraki, their lights flicker out and fade.

Peter does not know if he is afraid. He is something more than afraid. The feeling exists beneath the strain of his muscles and the strength of his bones. It is not in-his-blood. No, it is of his spirit. He is an animal that claws at his enemies for survival. It is base and unpretty.

He is not a man anymore.

Across the field, Eugene collapses under a horde of the undead. He sees his friend’s helpless hand get swallowed under the mass of bodies.

The undead begin to corner him. His back hits the wall. He swings his sword wide and unrefined. He shouts, to remind himself he is alive, but his own voice is drowned out by the screech of a dragon in the distance.

They are animals. All.

* * *

The women and children and the weak hide in the crypts. She resents her station. She should be out there with Peter, with her friends, fighting for the realm. Mankind will perish tonight, if they fail. She is able-bodied. She can fight.

The crypts shake.

She hears the dragon screech from above and huddles closer to the wall.

The crypts moan. It is not the moan of men.

Michelle freezes. Woman and children and the weak all stop breathing. Their hearts pound in a frenzy.

The crypts moan, again, and the first of the dead escape their tombs, crawling out to attack. The screaming starts as the undead lunge for the hidden masses.

Michelle narrowly manages to miss the mummified hand that grapples for her skirt. She snatches two children nearest to her and tucks each under one arm. She runs. She does not know what else to do. She will save who she can and do what she must. Survival is not a right, at the end of the world, she must fight for it.

* * *

Peter slashes through the undead. He decapitates another. He roars with each kill, as if he can be louder than death itself.

* * *

Michelle hides the children behind one of the now-empty caskets. She urges them to remain silent before she runs back out into the chaos to snatch more children to safety. Along the way, she picks up a mace and hacks her way to save the innocent.

* * *

One of the undead grab his arm. The touch stings, like winter wind. He struggles to get loose. Another grabs his leg.

* * *

She smuggles six children to momentary safety. When she grabs for another, the undead swarm her from three sides. She clutches the child to her chest and whispers calming words to the weeping child in the face of their certain demise. 

* * *

He yells, he writhes, like the wild animal this battle has made him, and tries to find freedom. Another undead creature grabs his last free arm.

* * *

“It’s going to be okay,” she lies.

* * *

“You bastards,” he cries.

* * *

Somewhere, beyond the battle, in the Godswood, No One lunges from the darkness and drives a blade into the heart of the enemy.

The dead fall.

All at once, they collapse into nothingness.

* * *

Peter is released. He sinks to his knees.

* * *

The dead that reach for Michelle and the child tucked into her arms plummet to the ground like the corpses they had once been. She sobs.

* * *

It is with weary bodies and broken hearts that the survivors of the Battle of Winterfell start to emerge from all corners of the battered castle. There are no survivors beyond the castle walls, Peter finds. When he finds Ned’s body, he barely looks like his friend. Ned could never be so lifeless. It takes everything in him, the tattered pieces that are left, not to throw up.

He has no family. He is an orphan of the War of the Five Kings, like most young men in Westeros. Whatever life he had known before Joffrey Baratheon had beheaded Eddard Stark is gone. There is nothing and no one he can go back to, now.

He aches for MJ. He loathes to think of her so lifeless, too. She has to be alive, he prays to the Old Gods and the New, for if she has perished there is no life for him beyond this battlefield. He will walk around like the undead for the rest of his days. A man can only lose so many things.

Peter starts to see reunions all over Winterfell. Lords and Ladies shout for their loved ones the same as the common folk. It is a humbling sight. All men must die. The when is the only true mystery.

He shouts for her, like the others stumbling beside him, but she does not respond. He is more than an animal now that the battle has been won, he is a man of flesh and bone and he feels fear. It is a noose around his neck that tightens and tightens with every passing moment he does not see her, or hold her in his arms.

He thinks back to the last time they saw each other, only hours ago, and he curses himself. He should have told her that he loved her, then. If she has gone onto the next place without knowing the depth of his feelings for her after all of these years, he does not know how he will cope. She deserved to know. He wasted so much time.

Then, like a miracle, he hears someone bellowing his name. He has never heard his name like a plea, before. It chills his bones. He turns on his ruined boot, torn through the sole, and sees salvation.

For there, across the courtyard, is Michelle. She has scratches up and down her arms and her face is muddied with blood. Her hair looks like it has been pulled by unholy forces.

But she is alive. And that truth, that is everything.

He does not reply to her screams. He does not have a voice. He staggers through the blood and mud and past the fallen bodies to her.

She sees him just before they collide. Her relief is palpable. Her lips form the shape of his name. He quirks a true smile. Michelle runs the short distance between them, throwing herself into his waiting arms.

He stumbles backwards at the force of their embrace. “Peter,” she whispers, over and over, again. “Oh Peter, you’re alive.”

Peter Parker cannot wait any longer. He has seen death, stared in its blue eyes and lived. In this, his second chance at life, he will not hesitate. Happiness is for the men that take it. “I love you,” he says. “I loved you, then. I love you now. I love you.”

She kisses every inch of his dirtied face. “I love you,” she replies. “I love you.”

* * *

He gifts her a cloak he wore in battle on their wedding day, bringing her under his protection. She gives him the mace that was the shield of the innocent in the crypts.

Theirs is a marriage of equals.

* * *

_Father._

_Smith._

_Warrior._

_Mother._

_Maiden._

_Crone._

_Stranger._

_I am hers._

_And he is mine._

_From this day._

_Till the end of my days._


End file.
